Cracked off another poster the other day. It was more or less a breeze, since the original poster layout is so nice and basic -- just throw together a simple background pattern, trim the photos, paste them in, add the taglines and credits, and it's good to go. The only thing I really had trouble with was the type: the original Freaky Friday title had red or purple block letters with a thick-ish black border, with slightly off-center, white letters overlaid onto that -- a nice look that conveys a sense of frenetic craziness. For the life of me, though, I couldn't convince Photoshop to give me type with a border in one color (black) and a fill in another color (red or purple), so I had to mock something up by manually placing red/purple letters on top of larger, black letters, and then placing even smaller white letter on top of that. The effect wasn't stellar, and no matter how I monkeyed with it I just couldn't make it look quite right. Aside from that, though, I'm fairly pleased with how it turned out:



All I have left is Charlie's Angels and Catch Me If You Can, which are both relatively simple layouts. The Charlie's Angels poster is a bit garish, though, with a fair amount of type in fonts that I may or may not be able to easily replicate. We'll see how it goes.

And now I am going to bed. It's been a helluva day: had a domestic situation described to me today that is the closest thing to pure evil I have yet encountered, my baby nephew is now on a feeding tube in a hospital in Seattle (if you're the praying sort, send a few his way), my wife's body is wrecked (see her blog for the gory details), and I have a very full day tomorrow. So on that cheerful note, g'night.

So I saw this the other day, and I just had to share. For those familiar with my pirate-themed youth, you'll realize that Captain Dan would've pretty much constituted my own personal soundtrack. As a rule I hate hip-hop, but for the Captain I gladly make an exception.

The whole pirate theme fits almost alarmingly well with modern hip-hop: booze-fueled braggadocio that glorifies violent crime and degenerate, dead-end lifestyles set to music. In the modern context, I find hip-hop unsettling. In a romanticized pirate context, where the violence and desperation are separated from me by a large body of fiction and several centuries of history, hip-hop is really something to enjoy.

As a bonus, Captain Dan sounds kind of like a combination of Weird Al Yankovic in "Amish Paradise" and Mike Myers in his "Lothar of the Hill People" character from his SNL days.

What a month. Two or three different diseases and a (almost) complete cleanup of the basement has translated into not much time or energy for blogging. And if that's not strictly true, it at least provides a convenient excuse, so I'm sticking to it. If you are inclined to feel sympathy towards me, please do not read my wife's blog (or at least refrain from reading about her own health issues, work stress, and parent stress).

I think therapy may be bad for my health. I see enough kids each week that I'm pretty much guaranteed to catch something from them, and at times the adults aren't much better. My own children aren't really into the "disease factory" stage yet, as they aren't in daycare or anything, although ECFE (for you non-Minnesotans, ECFE is a state-sponsored class for young children and their parents that provides education and mutual support around issues of raising little ones -- meaning that it is, in a word, awesome) is probably also a likely petri dish. On the upside, if I keep at it, maybe I'll eventually develop immunity to a big chunk of what's out there. Which'll be great for the three months it'll take for all the bugs to mutate into something my system won't recognize.

So Livia's almost walking! She can totally stand on her own, although she doesn't quite know it yet. Our best guess is that she's only weeks away from her first solo steps. I gotta admit that I really dig the whole father-daughter thing; this morning she practically lunged at me from my wife's arms, and once I was holding her she started putting her head down on my shoulder (which she never does) and just cuddling into me. Maybe it's because I've been around more with her than with William, or maybe we just click for whatever reason, but regardless Livia seems way more into me than her brother did at her age. I'll take it!

I've cracked off a couple more movie posters. I feel like I'm getting better at this; I had to create the A River Runs Through It poster from scratch, since there was no way to adapt the original and still have Luke's face recognisable (or even visible). I feel like I got the lighting just about dead-on: I added the light bloom underneath the title and jazzed up the general lighting of the forest pic I grabbed almost at random from the web. I'm especially proud of how I was able to mess around with Luke's lighting and color saturation to make him look like he's really out in the woods and not in the crappy, fluorescent-lit room in the back of our clinic at Stout where the pic was taken. The thing I struggled with the most is how (ahem) phallic the fishing pole comes off in the original picture. I think I've managed to mitigate that, but I'll let you, my readership, be the judge on that one.

The Napoleon Dynamite poster was easier, since I was fortunate enough to find a high-enough resolution poster image that I could directly use without having to really re-create anything. Putting Leng's pic over Napoleon's was simple enough, although I had to manually continue the marker drawing in the background, since my restrictions (Leng's photo is cut off at mid-thigh) meant that Leng had to stand lower in the poster so that the title could cover the bottom edge of his image. All in all, I feel like the end prouct is tidy and crisp if not especially complex.

Anyway, here they are. As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.





That's all I have for today. In theory, I should start posting more regularly again. And we all know how well that's gone.

So I usually forget to get political in my blog (the Wife usually has it covered anyway), but I just wanted to get my hopes out there for Obama ahead of Super Tuesday. Go Obama! Yay!

That's all I got, since I'm supposed to be doing case notes right now.

Crap, what a crappily craptastic week. I seem to have picked up someone's microbes last week and they have had a field day in my body this week: my supervisor sent me home at lunchtime from my off-campus practicum because I was looking so bad. I was feeling it too; I could feel myself going straight downhill during that final hour of therapy (thank God I was only the intern/junior cotherapist and therefore wasn't really responsible for providing a decent session) -- by the end of the hour it was all I could do to keep my eyes open and make some sort of low-level response when things seemed to require it. Spent the following day or so in bed, alternating between shaky-cold (very unusual for me, as when healthy I possess a near-superheroic amount of reliable body heat) and sweaty-hot. Weirdly, there didn't seem to be a fever by the usual is-your-forehead-hot yardstick.

Because of all of this, I had to miss the first of four meetings of my final 1 credit class on therapy with GLBT clients.

<worse-than-usual tangent>

I find it interesting that everyone seems to arrange those four letters differently. In my opinion, we as a society need to find another group whose name starts with a vowel that could be in some way lumped in with GLBTs -- then you could really have fun with it, spelling things like, say, GLABT or TALGB or even (with two such additions) GIBLET. Maybe I'll just start always using GBLT and see if anyone can see what I'm going for. I suppose Eastern Indians could provide those precious vowels, but I somehow suspect there'd be trouble if we attempted to lump their entire cultural and national identity in with our GBLT friends. Oh well, the search must go on...

</worse-than-usual tangent>

I just deleted what I was going to say about the subsequent events, because I fortunately remembered how thoroughly public the Internet is. Suffice it to say, my illness resulted, via a chain of events that must remain mysterious to my readership, in my having to drop the course (I'm still fairly cranky about the whole business). On the upside, I was able to get a lot more sleep, which I clearly needed. So yay, I guess.

Last term all of us in my cohort were certified to administer one of the various premarital counseling programs out there, and just this weekend I got my very first email of interest from a potential client (customer? what do you call it when it's not officially "therapy?"). I'm excited and a little nervous; at this point therapy isn't particularly nerve-wracking (wow, never thought I'd ever type that so soon), but this is much more structured, which is helpful but also means I could accidentally miss stuff that the programs deems important. I'm sure it's nothing more than stage fright, but that won't stop me from reviewing all of my material this week.

No posters this week, what with the advancing plague and all that. Hope to get back on that horse this coming week.

Now I will go to bed and attempt to sleep through all of my coughing (yup, 'cause now we're in the coughing stage of this biological train wreck). I swear, I just now coughed so hard that I almost puked.

Sickness is one of those things that is all-consumingly interesting to the person with the disease, but is nearly always shockingly dull to everyone else if the sick person tries to share their new interest. This is, of course, not true if the symptoms are really spectacular, like shooting a six-foot geyser of blood out of the top of your head, or having, like, one of your kidneys entirely consumed by spiders that you accidentally ingested while sleeping (that's an urban legend, by the way, the whole thing about the average person ingesting 11.5 spiders or whatever while sleeping over the course of their life). Of course, what you lose in conversational dullness you gain back in conversational awkwardness, because honestly, what do you say to someone who has anything at all like that happening to them? The most polite you can hope for is to freak out out of concern for their well-being, versus freaking out in fear and revulsion. Those aren't too far apart, really.

So to sum that rambling mess of a paragraph up, I realize that I very likely bored you all with my detailed account of my illness. I also realize that I don't care. Additionally, I am realizing that my ability to keep a lid on my stream of consciousness right now is truncated at best.

Okay. Bed.

So I unveiled the posters to my cohort today and according to them I look like Edward Norton. Which is interesting, because I always thought Chris looked like Edward Norton. Logic therefore dictates that Chris and I look alike. Who knew?

So I think I'm getting better at faking movie posters. Here are the two for this week, including the one for myself. My wife (bless her) spent about half an hour with me in the darkened basement with a digital camera and a mag-lite trying to get a shot of me that would work in terms of lighting for the Red October poster. I think it turned out pretty nicely. But see for yourselves:



The other poster is (obviously) Annie Hall, which I was excited to do because Kris had such a great photo (that's not a beheaded Diane Keaton; Kris dressed up for the photo so I was able to use her whole body -- I'm definitely not confident in my ability to replace heads only and have the product look at all natural). The payoff for this one came when my wife saw the final printout and looked at it intently for several minutes without being able to tell that it was a fake. When I showed it to her and said it was the fruit of my night's work, she was unimpressed: "so you printed a poster you found on the web, big deal." Then again, my wife has been known to not see local billboards for the better part of a year, so we'll see what everybody else thinks. Anyway, here it is:

So yeah, I'm starting on my second week of full-swing therapy for the spring term, and as my blogging record shows, that can make things more difficult. Not that I have much to report (that's ethically reportable, anyway).

I did just finish up the first piece of a little side project I took on for my cohort at Stout. In the processing room at the clinic there (where all of us talk/write up notes/etc. when we're not in session) some of the other programs have posted pictures of their students on the wall, perhaps as a "get to know your classmates" kind of initiative. We were feeling left out since we had no pictures on any walls, so we felt we should have them. We couldn't, however, just do the super-dull, student ID sort of photos, so I suggested the idea of having each of us in a fake movie poster. My graphics design major roommate back at UT did one way back when (thanks for the idea, Sasquatch) which turned out really slick and I figured, "how hard can it be?"

Answer: fairly hard. Not as easy as I was hoping, but not as hard as I was fearing. I just did the one, and I cobbled it together from existing poster images I found on the web plus the photos we took of ourselves at Stout. Here's the final result:



It's clearly a fake, but I think it's close enough to reality to be okay, and it's certainly better than a student ID photo. As you can tell, most of my source material was fairly low-res, while my picture of Star was extremely high-res (like 10 megapixels or some similarly ludicrous level of quality), so they don't fully match. I also didn't figure out a way to make the lighting between Star and Dick match up -- I'm sure there's a way in Photoshop, but I certainly haven't mastered it yet.

Next up is Annie Hall, Napolean Dynamite, or Charlie's Angels (did anybody really think that in a cohort that's mostly women there would be no Charlie's Angels?), depending on what's easiest, honestly. Hope they turn out at least as good as this one, because now I've set expectations.

Spent the last two days doing therapy, so pretty much anything noteworthy there that might have happened I can't talk about because of client confidentiality. Therapy days are fairly worthless for blog material. Tomorrow's my birthday, though, so I'm definitely looking forward to sleeping in a bit later than usual (well, 30 minutes, but I'll take what I can get at this point) and getting a real date night and going out to eat with just my wife. We tend to go to P.F. Chang's for birthdays, as we actively enjoy the food and atmosphere and the price point is workable for our truncated budget.

I'm certainly looking forward to it, but I always feel a certain twinge when I eat at a chain restaurant that serves up Americanized versions of world cuisine and enjoy the experience, and not in an ironic way. It's like I have this inner indie-foodie-hipster that is telling me that I should only enjoy "authentic" food at independently-owned establishments that promote local color, and that anything else is just being one of the sheep, man. I suppose it's an internalized symptom of the general elitism that characterizes many of the interests in our society today. For example, from many foodies I get a sense of utter contempt for anyone who would darken the door of a McDonald's; it's as though eating (or worse, enjoying) a Big Mac in all its reconstituted, special-saucy glory is like waving a banner that proclaims one's wretched ignorance, lack of respect for one's health and for the community/world, and one's sad state of being led around by the nose by the dark, corporate masters of Big Fast Food. Aficionados of liquor, beer, wine, or other luxury items can often be similar; if one doesn't prefer some completely obscure item but instead enjoys what most people have heard of, then that person is just not as intelligent/cultured/educated/what-have-you. Music and art tend in the same direction: the more inaccessible a given piece, the better it is considered to be. People who enjoy the mainstream in a non-ironic way are just sheep.

I think of this state of affairs as stemming from what I call the "critic's dilemma." A movie critic, for example, has the choice with each movie he reviews between panning it and lauding it. If he pans it, he is taking little or no risk: he either agrees with the general public (everybody knows it's terrible) or he disagrees with the bulk of the population, which can project the sense that his standards are higher than those of the masses (or even than those of other critics) because he is more educated/intelligent/cultured/sophisticated than they are. Contrast this to the situation if the critic praises a movie: if he agrees with the general public, probably no harm done, but if he is at odds with the consensus he is now tethered to this film that he has praised: if it is considered to stink, than the critic has now been shown to be someone whose standards are so low that he likes terrible movies. The long and short of this is that haughtily rejecting something is much, much safer in terms of image than is enthusiastically praising something. This is perhaps less true with less accessible, art-house films, because the "I'm sophisticated enough to get what you don't understand" card is available for films that do not typically appeal to the general public.

Obviously, good critics are able to rise above this formula, either because they are as people less invested in their image or because they are already respected enough that they can say whatever and it's cool (maybe some of each). And obviously, not everyone who has an interest in, say, Korean cuisine or Scotch whiskey is an elitist snob who is overly invested in appearing cultured.

I get the sense that people in these subcultures who put a lot of energy into denigrating the mainstream are those who feel that they are in some way attacked by it. I was one of those people myself growing up in small-town Texas: as a religiously liberal teenager in an extremely evangelical town, I would say and do provocative things (quote the Qu'ran, talk about comparative theology) for the ostensible purpose of showing these ignorant people that there's a bigger world than evangelical Christianity. The real reason I said those sorts of things was because I felt like a perpetual outsider, especially since I wasn't going to compromise my beliefs in order to join the evangelical group. Since I felt that nobody understood or respected my position and beliefs -- which was true on one level, since world religions are a particular interest of mine that most people just don't put time and energy into -- I resorted to puffing up my own intellectualism and belittling the "small-minded" people around me so that I could feel that I had something special after all.

What I failed to see back then was that the evangelicals around me didn't spend any time regarding me as a threat to their belief system, nor did they necessarily feel that my interests and conclusions were bad or wrong (merely misguided, perhaps). In fact, they probably didn't really think about me at all -- positively or negatively -- until I got up in their faces and behaved obnoxiously to them and their beliefs. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: by behaving ungraciously to the majority group in my town (my town's "mainstream"), I pretty much guarantee that at least some members of that group will feel somewhat antagonistic towards me. Ironically, if I had behaved with more grace and humility towards the beliefs of others, I would have gone much farther towards getting others to take a serious look at mine.

I get the impression that this sort of pattern is what's going on in the subcultures I'm going on about: "I don't feel validated by mainstream culture, so I will make myself feel big by valuing highly something that most people don't put much time into (due to lack of time, resources, interest, appeal, whatever) and then looking down on those around me because they don't care or know anything about it."

I was about to write about how these days I have lightened up in terms of my religious thinking and that I often respectfully engage others with different views than mine (just this past year, it's been door-to-door Mormon missionaries in the neighborhood and extreme anti-abortion activists on campus). What stopped me from just presenting that straight-up is that I'm not entirely sure that my own motivation is pure for doing that: am I simply illustrating a way of being in the world that my experiences have led me to and that I find spiritually satisfying, or am I instead taking an opportunity to illustrate how deliciously tolerant I am of other viewpoints... much more tolerant, of course, than the unenlightened masses out there. Going a step further, is this entire paragraph merely an exercise in showing the world how much more humble and self-aware I am than others? Am I a hypocrite for not deleting this whole paragraph right now? Am I being a spirituality elitist right now?

I do think that this social phenomenon is a reflection of how we as human beings handle our own insecurities, and so its seeds reside within each and every one of us. For example, if I were totally secure about my spiritual "image" I would have either not felt the need to write the last paragraph at all, or I would have simply written about my experience straight-up without some part of me questioning my motivation. What I'm not clear on, however, is the process by which these ultimately internal processes get expressed in the larger society.

And I certainly will not start down that road, since it's past my bedtime and the words on the screen are becoming fuzzier to my tired eyes.

So my weekend with William was almost entirely spent cleaning the house. The entire top floor (minus Livia's room -- I feel somewhat disempowered in there, as I have no idea where anything goes) has been cleaned and de-cluttered, Christmas has been taken down, and I even had some baked custard in the oven by the time the girls returned home. I had even showered and shaved recently. I feel like I was just a step away from meeting my wife at the door with an apron and makeup on, like some kind of horrible Sasquatch June Cleaver.

Still, it always feels good to clean the house, and my "cleaning" I mean "clean it my way." My wife cleans more often than I do, but I clean much more deeply than she does, and I don't tidy up simply by stuffing the clutter into drawers. My wife is well aware of this, and sometimes she'll even request that I wash the dishes or the children by remarking that while they've been washed before by her, they haven't been really cleaned by me in awhile. It's kind of an interesting arrangement: since her notion of cleaning is less intensive than mine, my wife will clean much more often but will leave out portions that I would say are fairly crucial; I, on the other hand, rarely clean, but when I do it usually involves all-day cleansing binges that leave the house more or less spotless. This synergy works out decently well, although sometimes the gap between my cleaning binges gets a little long for my wife's taste.

I find a certain serenity in a clean house. I sleep better, I feel less stress, and I am often in a better mood when the house is clean (or at least, my version of clean). In these respects cleaning house is a lot like exercise: it's great for me and I rarely do it.

The other day I was browsing Slumbering Lungfish and I saw an article about alternative versions of Santa Claus for various cultural/philosophical tastes, and the Pagan Santa really jumped out at me, so I figured I'd post it here (the whole article with the rest of the Santas is here):

Pagan Santa

That Christmas tree? Pagan. Those red and green lights? Pagan. That yule log, if anyone still had yule logs? Extremely pagan. Pagan Santa shows up in a breechcloth and antlers and enacts a battle between the Oak King and the Holly King, with the Oak King emerging triumphant as the Holly King returns to the womb to be born again. Once you retrieve your terrified children from under the couch, Pagan Santa will present to them a garland of mistletoe and a cone cow. Your child will emerge with a greater respect for old traditions, other cultures and the healing power of intensive therapy.

While I've never been able to take neo-paganism as a religious "tradition" seriously, somehow the idea of an antlered, barbarian Santa who fights battles and terrifies children is one that really grabs me. If nothing else, it means that I could be one hell of a mall Santa in my post-retirement years. Now try and get that image out of your head.

The wife has taken my daughter to a conference for work in Rhode Island (who knew anything happened in Rhode Island?), leaving William and I bachelors for the weekend. So far our exercise of single male prerogative has involved a visit to Home Depot and the paint store, and tomorrow's carnival of earthly delights includes some housecleaning and perhaps even the sawing and painting of a few boards of wood. For dinner we swilled tankards of milk and feasted on chicken and apple slices. We are wild men.

I've got a little home improvement project cooking, which always improves my mood. Our kitchen, despite our having painted it a warm shade of orange, has continued to feel a little cold and stark for our tastes, and it was only after I picked up a little hanging ivy plant and hung it up that we realized that we need some surface space for decor, and by "decor" I mainly mean "more plants." It is amazing how a single plant can make the entire end of the kitchen feel warmer, more welcoming, and less severe. The aforementioned surface space will be a long shelf that will run about a foot under the ceiling, over the doorways and windows; this will give us space for plants and cookbooks and what-not while simultaneously creating a very nice sense of shelter for those seated at the kitchen table -- even our test runs of just holding up an 8 foot board really made a difference. So I'm excited, and I'll post before and after pictures once it's finished.

That's about all I have for tonight. Hope everybody's Friday was good. If yours wasn't, you should have tried harder. Why do you have to be such a killjoy?

I should really be in bed right now, but I dare not let a day go by unblogged. I was literally having trouble keeping my eyes open driving up to Cambridge (the locale of my non-university practicum) today. While I'm obviously tired, I think it has something to do with the deteriorating condition of my glasses combined with the glare from the sun on the snow (during the day) or from the headlights of oncoming traffic (during the night). My glasses have really taken a beating in their three-year life; they've been run over by a school bus (not kidding -- they actually made it through surprisingly well), they've been removed from my face and bent up by babies and toddlers about a kabillion times (I get my glasses readjusted at the Target optical about once a month these days), they've been stepped on by me after my kids take them off and throw them on the floor as I stumble around looking for them with my effective visual range of about half a foot (did I mention that I'm nearsighted to a ludicrous degree?). Even without the lens damage, the stupid things are always grimy because my eyelashes are long enough to brush the inside of the lens, leaving behind little vertically-aligned streaks.

So all of that means that I probably need to get new glasses or a new round of contacts, which with my prescription (crazy nearsighted plus a weirdo, unusual astigmatism) is never cheap. Even if I'm able to do one, I certainly won't be able to do both, so I gotta choose. I'm seriously thinking about going back to contacts -- they're great for driving (wearing sunglasses becomes a non-issue) and for any kind of physical activity from horsing around with the kids to riding my bike, but they do tend to get tired after a solid 12 hours of use, and then they don't seem to be able to focus quite as well or even stay in quite as well. They're also an extra chunk of time in my always-rushed morning routine -- glasses are just grab and go. On the other hand, glasses can be a pain, and because my prescription is so severe they make my eyes look tiny -- not unlike Hans Moleman's.

In other, less personally optical news, looks like Obama and Huckabee are the darlings of Iowa tonight. As a pretty solid Obama guy, I can't say I'm disappointed, although I would of course have preferred a larger gap between him and Hillary. Still, this seems to prove Obama's viability as a presidential candidate and it certainly has allayed my nagging fear of some kind of Howard Dean-esque self-destruct (although Obama giving an "I have a scream" speech is difficult to imagine). Maybe new blood among the Dems doesn't have a curse on it after all. As for the GOP, I remain wary of Huckabee. I must admit to having some qualms about an ordained pastor serving as president; it just doesn't sit well on the whole separation of church and state thing from where I sit. Huckabee has also not impressed me with his eccentric ideas of fiscal reform, although I must give him credit for being willing to buck the status quo. In any event, for me to vote Republican they would need to run a really remarkable candidate (haven't really seen one so far over there, although McCain always seems worth a second look), since a change in parties in the White House means a corresponding change in all the politically appointed bureaucracy. Regardless of who the actual candidate is, a GOP victory will mean there's a much greater chance that Bush-era appointees and Bush-era groupthink will remain in place -- if not at the top, then in the middle layers -- and I think both sides of the general population agree that we're long overdue for a change away from that.

Chuck and I have agreed to keep each other blogging in the new year, so here goes my first attempt of many to avoid his shaming glare.

Let's see, what's happened since I last posted? My daughter, Livia, was born last March, and holy God is she adorable. Her first two teeth are just now coming in on the bottom, which has made her super clingy lately. Watching my second (and last) child get older is a bittersweet experience: as each stage comes and goes I know it'll be the last time I'll get to have a child in that stage. Already I can look back at Livia's newborn pictures and remember how tiny and cuddly she was back then (and part of me wants another baby...). At the same time, though, seeing how much personality William has at age 2 and how much he can interact with us and with the world makes me excited to see what Livia will be like as she gets older.

It's weird, but sometimes when I see an adolescent girl (and I see a few of them as clients lately) it hits me that someday Livia will be in their shoes and might be dealing with a lot of the stuff they're dealing with. Just the idea of my little baby girl being on the cusp of adulthood like that is scary and exciting at the same time. I wonder what kind of teenager she'll be: what parts of pop culture she'll be into, will she be naturally slim or heavy, will her hair still be strawberry blonde, will she be an intellectual or will she be more practical in her approach to life, will she be into sports, will she be interested in playing a musical instrument, what kinds of boyfriends will she bring home, will she be interested in spirituality, will she be really girly or more androgynous?

What's strange is that I don't really have similar thoughts about William when I see adolescent boys -- I know he'll be a man somebody and I'm interested to see what he'll be like, but my mental images of a teenage William are fairly abstract and hazy, whereas I am more able to form concrete images of what Livia might look like. Perhaps it's a gender thing, or maybe it's just because I had the experience of watching my sister grow from a little girl into a grown woman whereas I had the experience of being a boy who grew up into a man; while the latter is of course a richer experience, it lacks the visual element of the former.

In any event, I already have trouble remembering what it was like to just have William, to say nothing of how it was when we had no kids at all (what did we do with ourselves back then?).

I'm staying home from class today -- looks like the wife is going into the early stages of labor. We could have our daughter any time now!

You Are a Conservative Democrat

Frankly, the way most other Democrats behave embarasses you greatly. You pride yourself on a high level of morals, and you have a good grasp on right and wrong. It's likely you think America needs to get back to its conservative, Juedo-Christian values. Why aren't you a Republican then? Because you believe the goverment helps more than hurts.

God, I'm such a sucker for these little quizzes, even though they're only slightly more accurate than rolling dice to discover things about yourself. I dunno if I agree with the "Judeo-Christian values" thing, but I suppose this does reflect my political stance as a slightly left-of-center, die-hard moderate.

I just got done reading an article for one of this week's assignments; it was by a man who grew up in a Polish Catholic orphanage in Chicago and who only in his middle years began to discover his Polish identity and what it means to him. I found the piece really well-done; I was very moved by the author's (naturally, I can't remember his name at the exact moment...) emotional journey through feeling almost completely alone and disconnected from the world around him to his discovery of his rich ethnic heritage.

I think part of my I'm so stirred by the article is that he related his discovery of something I feel that I, for reasons I'll get into, am still searching for. Towards the beginning of this class we were asked about the identities we felt were important to us, and I (like many whites I know) indicated that I felt that I had no particular cultural or racial identity. We were subsequently told that whites do indeed have race, and that culture is not necessarily just about foods you eat or specific religious rituals -- and we then read about the priveleges of whiteness and so on.

While I agree that culture/race is certainly more than where you fulfill your spiritual needs or what you eat for dinner, I do indeed feel that I at least am lost in my own American, WASPy identity, and the author's description of his Polish identity really elucidated some of what that means to me.

First, a bit about my family background: my family goes back to the Mayflower on both sides, and I myself am more racially English than anything else. Like most white people, there are more recent immigrations in my family (my great-great-grandfather came to America with his brother from Denmark), though by and large my family is characterized by people who have been in North America for a relatively long time.

This has had the effect of diluting my sense of any European culture my family brought with them to America, and of diluting my sense of ethnic connection with my fellow Americans. I first became aware of this disconnection while growing up in Central Texas, which is a region that was heavily settled by the Czechs. I grew up with many friends with Czech names, attended weddings with Czech dances, ate Czech food (I highly recommend kolaches, if you ever are offered one), and visited towns with Czech names. The Central Texas Czechs generally seemed to experience a commonality and had a way to plug into each other on some level, even if it was just around special occasions. Many small towns there still have an SPJST hall, which is something like a Czech version of the Knights of Columbus. In my hometown there are also lots of ethnic Mexicans, and their presence is very much in force. It's not uncommon to see signs and billboards in Spanish and Mexican flags alternated with American flags at many places of business. There is also a large black population, though their presence isn't as overt as the Czechs or Mexicans.

I grew up being generally friendly with all of these groups, but I always felt like an outsider -- I could participate in this or that group's traditions or even learn something of their history, but I could never actually be a part of those groups. I was instead just generically American without any of the hyphenated specifiers (Mexican-American, Czech-American, etc.) that the people around me celebrated. The only descriptor out there for my group is WASP, which only conjures images of snobbish, New England aristocrats -- hardly an identity a young Texan wants anything to do with. Since moving to Minnesota I see many of the same patterns: Latinos here seem to be downright clannish, and the Czech identity is replaced by Scandinavian and Irish identities (among others -- a friend's grandfather owns a T-shirt that reads "if you ain't Dutch you ain't much"). And once again I find myself on the outside looking in.

In an era of identity politics all I can claim is White Anglo-Saxon Protestant -- which is exactly what virtually every other group defines themselves in opposition to. According to the conventional wisdom, WASPy whites are the ones who oppressed all immigrant groups, enslaved Africans, and decimated the Native American tribes. WASPS are the plutocrats and slave-holders and exploiters of the poor. And, perhaps most importantly for my dilemma, WASPs have historically constituted the norm in America and therefore feel no particular push to join with each other in terms of their shared culture (at least, not WASPs outside of New England). Moreover, as more recently enfranchised groups add to the "normal" American culture, it drifts farther and farther from something that is particularly WASPish; the WASPs, meanwhile, seem to simply flow with the new culture without anywhere preserving those features that distinguished them as WASPs in the first place. In the process, "WASP" in America increasingly becomes associated with "wealthy enclave in New England" and those of us who are technically WASP but merely identify with mainstream American culture are left without a group. In most places in the country, WASPs are now just generically "white".

I've struggled with that sense of an identity vagueness over the years. For a long time I've defined myself instead as a true son of Texas, which is a very easy, inclusive identity (I know a couple of ethnic Iranians who are at least as proud to be Texan as I am). What I am becoming more and more aware of, however, is that the longer I live in Minnesota the less relevant that regional identity seems to be. I'll always love Texas, but am I really ethnically a Texan? Is that even possible?

Given that big chunks of my family have been in the South for generations, I also cling to my Southern identity. I can make an ethnic claim a bit more here: some of my speech patterns are Southern, as are many of my ideas of what constitutes correct behavior (respect for elders, holding doors for women, a higher standard for politeness, etc.). Still, especially since I've moved north, I've found that the Southern identity is not smiled on in our culture: TV shows only depict Southerners as being anachronistic Colonel Sanders lookalikes or as being uneducated, backwards rednecks. "Southern" is synonymous with racism and hate crimes in the larger American culture, and it seems to be completely acceptable to speak categorically of the South in denigrating terms. Just the other day I read in a book -- intended for non-Americans new to the country -- that Southern culture is characterized by a legacy of shame and defeat (the author, predictably, is from New England). Say that about any other culture, and you'd have an uproar, but for most people that statement is simply "the truth". Worse, Southern culture, like so many American regional identities, is eroding in the face of the homogenizing effect of the tremendous mobility we enjoy in the United States.

My children, however, will enjoy no such regional/ethnic identity, however dim the culture's view of it. As half-WASP Minnesotans raised by a Southerner, they will be not quite Minnesotan and Southern only by association. What identity can I offer them? To what ocean of humanity (to use the author's words) can I point to and say to them, "you came from there"? The author says that the best part about being Polish is that he is Polish -- that he gets to plug into the larger world of his ethnicity and know that there is a body of people who experience to some degree what he experiences, and that they are unified on some level by that sharing. All I can do for my kids is gesture vaguely at white America and say, "You are almost certainly related to some of those people. Oh, and a couple of your ancestors were here first. Well, except for the Native Americans. And they were religious nuts whose views and practices we haven't held for generations."

Perhaps this is why I tenaciously cling to a view of America that has us all in it together: if accomplishments and struggles and everything else that a people does together are owned by Americans in aggregate, then I get to be included. If, however, those things are owned only by the particular ethnic group(s) involved, then I will always be on the outside.

Well, citizens, after the long silence I'm back once again to astound and amuse you. I've now been unemployed for exactly a month, and I've been a grad student for nearly as long. It's been a crazy ride so far, but I'm enjoying myself in my new little life.

So in my "Cultural Competency" class we've been talking about race, and frankly a lot of what we've read I've heard before; unfortunately, that fails to keep the material from getting under my skin, so I'm gonna process some of that here and see what I wind up with.

A lot of the material echoes the classic structural idea of racism in society: that our society is still in many way racist, evicenced by the fairly well documented facts that non-whites tend to have a harder time getting loans, getting housing, dealing with the police, getting educations, and making the same amount of money as whites. The structural argument notes that these are systemic features of a racist society with racist institutions: that the racism is less about the classic personal racism of a KKK member or something and more about the small ways in which all participants in society -- particularly whites -- reinforce the racist features of society.

On the macro level, I can buy that. What I react to is the unspoken (actually, not always unspoken) but implied idea that *all* whites, as part of the dominant group, contribute to the oppression of non-dominant groups.

Actually, let me digress for a moment: one of the big problems I have with much of the language around this topic is the overuse of the words "victim" and "oppressor" to describe any instance of racism, sexism, etc. When I think "oppression", I think of the Holocaust, or Rwanda, or the Taliban, or slavery, or the Spanish Inquisition; "oppression" brings to mind willful acts of terror and violence perpetrated on a large scale by the very strong against the very weak. Using the term "oppression" to describe the experience of someone who's passed over for a promotion because of racial discrimination is to me disrespectful to those who have experienced *real* oppression in their lives: there's a huge difference between the glass ceiling and a Klan lynching. The other by-product of victim/oppressor language is that it forstalls any real dialogue about the complexity of roles people play in the system: it simplifies the situation into the wholly innocent victims and the wholly evil oppressors, and any attempt to add subtlety to the dialogue results in the admonition of "you can't blame the victim for the acts of the oppressor". Having the dialogue locked up in this way only serves to make the material highly confrontational and thus alienating to the very people that the users of this language would like to reach. It certainly doesn't seem like a constructive way to move forward.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. To the implied idea that all members of the dominant group are to some extent guilty of maintaining the racist system I must react with some degree of outrage: as someone who spends a fair amount of time thinking about the implications of race in society, I actively try to conduct myself in a way that creates an atmosphere of openness to all people. In my own life, I've found that people respond to me when I'm genuine and when I treat everyone more or less the same regardless of what they're wearing, what color skin they have, or whatever; as a result, I've found that my friends over the years have come from a fairly diverse cross-section of whatever little society I'm a part of (high school, UT, my workplace, whatever): growing up, I was always the guy who had at least one buddy in just about every little clique or social group in school. What's more, I find that my attitude of genuine-ness seems to also create a space to talk not only about common similarities (school, work, current events, whatever), but also differences in terms of culture, family, race, and religion.

I can't help but feel a little defensive, then, when this reading material starts implying that regardless of how I live my life, I not only am fated to perpetuate a cycle of racism that I'd always felt I was doing my part to break down, but I am so fated simply because of the color of my skin.

After thinking on this, and after last week's discussion in class, the idea is starting to gel that what I'm reacting to is less a conflict about the subject of racism itself, but rather a conflict about *how* it's discussed: essentially, the structural model versus the individual model. It breaks down like this: to the structuralist, racism is a systemic problem in society that all participants in that society contribute to (in the case of the dominant group) or are affected by (in the case of non-dominant groups). The individualist, on the other hand, sees racism in society as a collection of individual acts perpetrated by individual people, either knowingly or unknowingly; the macro trends that structuralists see are merely the accumulation of those individual acts.

The conflict comes from how each side reads the other. When a structuralist hears an individualist (I'm just making these terms up, by the way -- I dunno if there are more formal words to describe these two ideas) say that the problem isn't systemic and that it's ultimately a problem at the individual level, it can be read as a denial of societal racism in general. Conversely, when an individualist hears a structuralist say that everyone in the system is contributing to and is affected by it, it can come across as though every white person is, regardless of their individual circumstances, incurably racist.

The difference continues, or so I gather, in the question of what to do about the problem of racism in society. A structuralist sees the problem in terms of impersonal systems, so they are going to lean more towards impersonal, systemic ways of addressing the issue (e.g. affirmative action). An individualist, on the other hand, sees the problem as stemming from individuals' racism, so they would probably lean more towards decentralized approaches (perhaps look for ways to get local whites and local blacks to mix socially with each other).

As an individualist, I am leery of top-down approaches like affirmative action, which I see as often doing more harm than good (for instance, affirmative action introduces into the air around any non-white worker, "are they here because of affirmative action, or because they're qualified?" -- it attacks the systemic problem by getting non-whites into a larger portion of the workforce, but it introduces other problems for the individuals affected by it). What I see as the recipe for long-term success is the mixing together of whites and non-whites, so that social relationships, professional networking, and understanding of the "other" start to cross racial lines among individuals in a community. I truly believe that a lot of the unintentional racism out there comes from a lack of exposure to other races. I know I personally see more of it here in the upper Midwest than I saw in the South, simply because where I live is massively white, whereas the South is much more evenly mixed.

Anyway, I have class now so I'll stop talking for now. I have more to say, but I'm not entirely sure how to organize it all yet.

Chuck did this for his 30th birthday, and as mine is coming up in a few months, and since I'll almost assuredly forget about this exercise when the time comes, I'll do it now. "It" is a reflection on what I've done in the past decade of my life:

Places I've visited for the first time:

Cities: Edinburgh, Glasgow, Falkirk, Prague, Dresden, Budapest, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Vatican City, Siena, Florence, Nice, Monaco, Barcelona, Interlaken, Philadelphia, New York, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Seattle, Manila, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Monterey, Denver, Duluth, Chicago, Burlington, Iowa City, Las Vegas

States: Vermont, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Washington, California, Nevada

Countries: Scotland, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Spain, Monaco, Philippines


Things I've done for the first time (mostly in chronological order):

Got drunk
Did voice-over work
Got stabbed in the face with a sword (unrelated to "drunk")
Got a speeding ticket
Graduated from college
Stood in a Roman ruin
Rode a moped
Started an IT career
Moved to the Twin Cities
Bought a new car
Walked across a frozen lake
Learned to ski, sort of
Gambled at a Vegas casino
Wrote a performance review for someone I managed
Took a cooking class
Spun my car 360 degrees (snow was involved)
Canoed (note that "learn to canoe" does not appear)
Saw the Pacific Ocean
Learned qi gong
Butchered a chicken
Bought a house
Got married
Drove a convertible
Was on national television (for like .2 seconds as an audience member on the Tonight Show)
Shoveled snow
Learned to play the cello
Remodeled a bathroom
Gave blood
Had a nephew
Performed on the street for money
Watched my son be born
Cut an umbilical cord
Saw my mom sing in Carnegie Hall
Learned zazen
Reviewed a book for money
Rode a "real" roller coaster
Ended an IT career
Started grad school

Things I remember:

Pope John Paul II died the weekend my son was born.

9/11: I went to work as usual, and upon my arrival everybody told me to hit CNN.com and see the news. From my window I could usually watch the airplanes taking off from the airport, but for the next few days there was nothing.

The Y2K "crisis": I had the support pager on New Year's Eve for Y2K, and of course nothing happened.

The dot com boom -- I made my spending money my senior year of college working for Austin-area dot coms, some of which folded.


I know everyone will find this just fascinating, but it's nice for me to see all of the random crap I've done with myself for the last 10 years.

Once again I have that feeling that I have important, interesting things to discuss in today's blog, but I just can't think of what those things might be. So instead I'll just serve up some rambling, stream-of-consciousness blather.

So Friday's the big day when I come out of the closet in the quitting-work-to-go-to-grad-school sense (my life isn't exciting enough to come out of the closet in the usual sense of the phrase). I'm not entirely sure how I feel about this; I'm simultaneously excited, terrified, and giddy. I keep spinning through the usual litany of self-doubt ("What if counseling isn't the right choice? What if I fail as a counselor? What if I should be going into something else?"), but I find it telling that I don't really have much doubt that quitting my job is the right thing to do, even though the lack of income should be the most terrifying thing of all. Interestingly, I'm signed up to donate blood Friday morning, so I'll be delivering the news while I'm a pint short.

Grad school itself still doesn't seem quite real -- it's been in the (relatively) distant future for so long that now that it's just around the corner it still doesn't register as the focus of my new life for the next two years. I think I'd be more nervous about it if my class last fall at the U didn't go as well as it did, but as things stand my post-employment future still seems grey and unformed, even though I know exactly what I'll be doing.

Instead, I find myself focused almost entirely on the next three weeks -- what it'll be like to officially give notice, what my final good-bye email will say, what my farewell happy hour will be like, how people around here will react to the news. I have a sneaking suspicion that the few days immediately after my last day at the office will have a post-Christmas vibe to them: all of the excitement is spent, all of the presents have been opened, and the special day is over. Between me giving notice and my last day, I'll be special in a way -- there's always been a somewhat heroic aura around the people who've left to do other things -- but once I'm totally done I'll just be another guy.

Of course, I'll be just another guy in grad school, so that ain't a bad thing.

The office has a somewhat festive air this morning, as my international company's CEO is visiting our little corner of the business today. He'll be speaking to us at Minneapolis' historic State Theater, after which we'll have a little cookout in the building's front lawn. The mood was enhanced by the presence of the Red Bull Dudes(TM): a couple of hip college guys who make friendly, superficial conversation and hand out free cans of chilled Red Bull.

I personally am a little frightened of Red Bull. While it claims to give you wings and otherwise enhance your bodily functioning, why is it that such an amazing energy drink has only recently appeared on the market? Does it rely on cutting-edge, energy-enhancing technology? Or does it merely rely on Asian folk remedies that never made it through the FDA approval process in their originl, traditional forms? The fact that this mysterious, syrupy beverage is apparently potent enough to warrant its sale in tiny little cans even in our Mountain Dew X-Treme thirst nation, combined with the concern that several EU countries' FDA-equivilants have expressed over its presence in their societies make it something I find I am willing to live without. I bicycle here and there from time to time, but my geneally sedentary lifestyle hardly warrants the unlooked-for gift of wings.

As I discussed the presence of the Red Bull Dudes(TM) in the office with my coworker, he mentioned a bizarre run-in he had recently with the Jaeger Girls(TM). It seems that in locales prone to incidents of awesome partying, alcohol vendors will employ squadrons of young, attractive women to wear little more than their vendor-approved, logo-emblazoned party gear and meet and greet the local males in order to encourage the consumption of their patron beverage. My coworker found himself at an after-bar get-together with some of the Jaeger Girls(TM), who were discussing their competition. "The Budweiser Girls(TM) are okay -- even though they're all ugly -- but the Miller Lite Girls(TM) are, like, total skanks!" At this point, another coworker observed that it was good to see that there was a market niche where graduated sorority girls and frat boys could support themselves.

I can't really judge them myself, as I have spent time in my collegiate youth selling AT&T Universal Cards (it's a combination credit card, phone card, and ATM card all in one! Sign up now and get your FREE STUFF!) to my fellow students. I will, however, join my coworkers in their incredulous wondering at the people who think that the Red Bull Dudes(TM) or the Jaeger Girls(TM) are actually friendly with them because of their personal qualities. "Hey man, that Jaeger Girl(TM) is totally digging on me -- I mean, she keeps, like, talking to me and I keep, like, buying Jaegermeister -- we have so much in common!" The fact that employing squadrons of Dudes and Girls is worth it to the vendors is itself kind of a sad commentary on the average American citizen.

As for the office party, I normally loathe these all-office get-togethers, as they combine (for me) all of the worst elements of large parties: I will know virtually no one outside of my increasingly small service group, and I have little in common with virtually everyone. That's a trend that seems to be ever more prevelant as I wind down my IT career -- I never really fit in with my fellow businesspeople: my interests tend toward the esoteric, and most (not all, thankfully) of my coworkers are more interested in sports or TV or whatever. Since the parties are rarely conducive to the small-group conversation I prefer, I expect to be leaving early as usual.

At least I'm now in a position to not particularly care about what others think or whether I'm being professionally bland enough, so maybe that'll add some spark to an otherwise dull evening.